Depths of Peril is a single player action role-playing game (RPG) with strong strategy elements. You play as a faction leader protecting the barbarian city, Jorvik, by destroying threatening monsters and completing quests. At the same time, you compete with rival factions to see who will rule the city. Barbarians choose their leaders by fighting to the death!

As a faction leader, you must deal with rival factions through diplomacy, trade, and in time, war. Between battles and raids against other barbarian factions, you build the most powerful faction possible, to withstand your enemies. Building the power of a faction involves exploring a fantasy world, slaying dangerous monsters, solving quests for the city, avoiding deadly traps, and plundering loot to share within your faction.

But in this world, actions actually have consequences, so take care. Annoying the powerful and aggressive Legion of Fear faction will cause them to declare war and destroy you. Ignored orc uprisings in the Black Forest will cause even more trouble. Protect ally covenants that are being raided, because friends are hard to come by.

Mac OS X 10.3.9 should also run Depths of Peril fine, but you need OpenAL installed first. You can download the OpenAL installer from Creative.

Getting Started------------------To start a new character choose Play Game and then choose New Character.

Choose the class you want this character to be. You can choose to be a warrior (male), a rogue (female), a priest (female), or a mage (male). The description for each class is below:

I am a warrior. With legendary strength, I heft the heaviest of armor and massive weapons. Using brute force, I overrun small armies and push back the monstrous hordes, as long as my pack carries plenty of healing potions. Magic? That’s for wimps. Ever notice mages tend to be lushes? Man up! Pick me.

I am a rogue, stealthy and sleek. My skill in a variety of short blades complements my ability to hide in the shadows. I am a dark huntress, looking for a fresh pulse to claim. Take me. After all, muscles aren’t everything.

I am a priest, wielding the power of the gods. The symmetry between my deadly art and healing capabilities make me an exotic champion. Maintaining this combination requires a steadfast faith, renewed through prayer. Choose me. I walk in the light.

I am a mage, the greatest wielder of magic there is. My elemental magic is frightening to behold, and I enjoy watching most of an attacking horde fall before they get too close. My claim to magic prevents me from any but the simplest of armor, but the magic is worth this meager price. My ability to survive depends on concentration, often promoted by the drinks I carry in my satchel. The others can’t hold a candle to my power! Select me, and have a drink.

Name your character whatever you like. You can also use the random name generator to generate barbarian names or just to give you some ideas.

Name your covenant. Each covenant is a group of barbarians vying for control of the city. It consists of one hero (the leader of the covenant) and up to 5 recruits. Each covenant lives together in their covenant house.

On this next screen, you select some basic options on how difficult you want the game to be.

Select the enemy covenant power. This is the starting level of the enemy covenants and is equivalent to your characters level. This will default to a level near what your current character level is. If you want a harder game, choose a higher value than the default. If you want an easier game, choose a lower value.

Select the enemy covenants aggression. You can choose easy, normal, or hard. The higher their aggression, the more the enemy covenants adventure, the quicker they are to go to war and raid other covenants, and the less effect diplomacy has. This initially defaults to easy but will save the last setting you used.

Select the world difficulty. This is the difficulty of the world itself. The higher difficulty levels are only unlocked when your character reaches the appropriate levels.

Choose the number of enemy covenants you want to face in the game. This can be anywhere from 3 to 6 enemy covenants. You can also choose Random if you want the game to choose.

When you are done selecting these options, click Create New World to start the game.

Basics-------Most of the tips in this manual also show up in the game in the form of help topics. To read a help topic click on the blinking question mark icons. You can also start the help topics again by Reseting the Help Topics in the Game Options.

Please also take some time to play through the tutorial in the game and read the tool tips. Both of these make learning the game a lot easier.

Left clicking with the mouse is context sensitive and does the most common action (move, attack, pick up, etc.) whereas right click does the more rare actions like selecting a monster or using an item.

Hold the ALT key down to see all of the items on the ground at once.

Objective-----------The objective of each game or new world is to become the leader of Jorvik and thus unifying the barbarian city. There are two ways to accomplish this. The first way is by destroying all of the other covenants. To destroy a covenant you must raid their house and destroy their lifestone. The second way is by using diplomacy and war to eliminate all enemies and make the remaining covenants allies. If you are the most powerful covenant and all of the remaining covenants are your allies then you will get a normal win. If all of the remaining covenants are your allies but you are not the most powerful then you will have to make a choice. You must either take a reduced Allied Win (less rewards) or fight it out.

When you have won the game, you can finish up whatever you need to and can then start a new game. Make sure you open your reward chest in the center of town and next to any covenants you have recently destroyed. Once you are done, you can start a new game by clicking on the blinking won game icon. Don't worry, your characters, items, and recruits all carry over into the new game.

More Class Info-------------------A warrior's power is called rage and starts at zero. Warriors get rage each time they hit an enemy, an enemy hits them, or they successfully block or parry a blow. Rage will slowly drain away if not used quickly.

A mage's power is called mana and starts full. Each spell uses up some amount of mana and when too low, spells can no longer be cast. There are many ways to replenish mana: it will slowly regenerate during combat, it will regenerate faster out of combat, drinking drinks will replenish it fairly quickly, and finally you can drink a mana potion which will instantly give back some mana based on the quality of the potion.

A rogue's power is called momentum and starts at zero. A few skills build momentum up but most of the skills use up momentum; however all of the skills halt the momentum drain when used. A rogue also gains momentum from each critical hit she performs and for each enemy she kills. After a while if the momentum is not halted or raised, it will slowly drain away.

A priest's power is called faith and starts full. Each spell uses up some amount of faith and when too low, spells can not be used. Faith will slowly regenerate and there are no drinks or potions available but a priest can pray at any time to regenerate their faith fairly quickly.

Recruits----------You can recruit NPCs to your covenant in two ways. The easiest, but rare way, is to find recruits out in the world. These npcs will always join your covenant if you ask. The other way is by competition. Every once in a while an unaffiliated barbarian will announce that he or she is available to be recruited but he or she wants to go to the best covenant possible. In order to prove your worth, you must solve the given quest before all of the other covenants can. These potential recruits will show up in the center of town.

Recruits greatly add to the power of your covenant and make it much easier to destroy the other covenants. You can only adventure around with one recruit at a time but you can have up to five recruits in your covenant. Each recruit has a class and a level just like a normal character but they focus on 4 chosen skills. So even recruits that are the same class usually are a little different. You can see all of the recruit's information by left clicking on them and choosing the Display Info and Equipment option. You can also give them better equipment in this way. Also notice that when you highlight an item and it shows the item you already have equipped for comparison purposes, you can hit the left & right keys to cycle through your recruits' items to compare.

Covenant House--------------------Your house layout is used to place your relics and guards. Relics are magic items that effect everyone in your covenant at the same time, so they can be very powerful. You can have four relics displayed at once. Guards are monsters that you can buy to protect your house from covenant raids and town attacks. You can buy guards from the beastmaster using crystals (covenant version of money). You can only have four guards on guard duty at once.

Your lifestone is the health of your covenant. Your character and all of your recruits are soul bound to the lifestone. This is what allows you to resurrect when you die. Until the lifestone health gets really low, it uses some of its own health to resurrect you or your killed recruits. The last small amount of health can only be drained by melee or magic attacks. If your lifestone is destroyed, then you and your recruits will die and you will lose this game. Don't worry, you can always start a new game where your character, items, and recruits will carry over. There is only one way for a lifestone to regain health it has lost, time. All lifestones will regenerate health slowly if they are damaged. Also, using your lifestone will heal your character. This does not harm your lifestone in any way.

Your bookshelf is there to hold your collection of tomes. Each tome that you have on your bookshelf gives you a small attribute bonus, so collect as many as you can. However, you can only have one of each tome on your bookshelf and each tome has a specific slot that it goes into. If you drop a book anywhere on the bookshelf, it will automatically go to the correct slot.

The stash is your extra inventory space where you can store whatever items you want. Note: only bags can go directly into the stash. Any type of item can go into these bags though.

Your shared stash is shared by all of your players that you have created. Note: only bags can go directly into the stash. Any type of item can go into these bags though.

Your covenant gate allows you to quickly teleport to places around the world where you have found gates. To activate a gate in the world, you simply use it by left clicking on it. Once it is activated you can return to it from your covenant gate whenever you want. You can also use your gate to teleport to the other covenants and a spot on the other side of town. When looking at the world map use the scrollbars or hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse to move the map around. Note: if you start a new game/world only the gates in the zones that are straight north of town will carry over.

Influence/Crystals----------------------Influence is a measure of how much influence you have within the barbarian city and it directly impacts how much taxes you collect. You gain influence for killing monsters, solving quests, and destroying covenants. You can also trade influence (give away or get).

Crystals is the form of money that a covenant uses. Each covenant collects crystals from taxes from the city and spends them on things like guards, starting rumors, and trade with other covenants. The higher your influence with the town the more crystals you will get from taxes. However, most guards cost some taxes each tax period. You can see how many crystals you have on the house layout, when trading with the beastmaster, and when trading with another covenant. You can see how many crystals you collect per tax period on the house layout, when trading with the beastmaster, and on the relations screen.

Diplomacy-------------Going to war with all of the other covenants at the same time is basically suicide, so you need to keep them peaceful until you are ready to crush them. You can do this by using diplomacy, primarily through trade. You can trade many things with the other covenants including items, money, influence, crystals (covenant version of money), treaties (non-aggression, mutual protection, alliance), declare war on someone, and trade routes (5 different sizes). In general, the more you trade with a covenant the more they will like you.

Be careful when your relations gets too low with the other covenants. The lower your relations get with a covenant, the more likely they are to declare war and/or raid your house. The easiest ways to improve your relations are to trade with the other covenant or even give them gifts. They also appreciate when you kill recruits from enemy covenants and any monsters that are attacking their house.

War/Raids-------------To destroy an enemy covenant you need to raid their house and destroy their lifestone. To start a raid, go to the relation screen, left click on the covenant you wish to raid and then pick the raid option.

During a raid you can take as many of your recruits as you wish. Also, expect to die many times in a raid, this is normal. Luckily there is no xp debt penalty when dying in raids. However, each time you or one of your recruits dies, your lifestone takes some damage until its health is very low. This is true of your enemy's lifestone also. A lifestone's last bit of life can only be damaged by direct attack by melee or magic attacks.

Main UI Screens--------------------Here is a quick list of the main UI screens with their default hotkeys. Character - CQuests - QSkills - SInventory - ICovenant Relations - RHouse Layout - LMap - MJournal - JMain menu - EscMinimap - TabAll of these also have small buttons at the bottom of the screen.

The character screen shows the basic stats of your character. Place the mouse cursor over anything that you want more information about.

The skill screen shows all of the skills available for your character class. A gold border around the skill icon means that you have that skill. Notice that there are multiple tabs. Each class has 3 tabs for class specific skills, 1 tab for bonus skills that are available to any class, and 1 tab to show what basic skills the class starts with.

The skills are not arranged in a skill tree. All of the skills are available at the very beginning, but they each have a different point cost. In general, the lower the skill is on the screen the more points they cost. For each skill level, the point cost increases by one compared to the last skill level. Buying a skill also costs some amount of money based on the point cost.

There are two types of skills: passive and active. Passive skills are skills that automatically work with no input needed from the player, assuming you have the skill of course. Active skills only work when the player uses them in the appropriate way. The easiest way to use a skill is add it to your hotkey bar and press the associated hotkey.

Town NPCs---------------There are three main vendors in town: a small items vendor, an armorsmith, and a weapon smith. They each carry different items but you can sell any item to any of the vendors for the same price. To buy an item, just move the item from the vendor's inventory to your own or right click on the item. To sell an item, just move the item from your inventory to the vendor's or hit the sell hotkey (defaults to space). You can also identify all of your unidentified items here all at once for a price.

The gambler allows you to gamble on items. To gamble, just buy the item like normal and if you are lucky it will be a magical item worth more than what you paid for.

The beastmaster sells magically enchanted guards. All guards cost a certain amount of crystals (covenant version of money) and most cost an upkeep amount (crystals per tax period). There is a small chance that a monster might break its enchantment.

There are three main quest givers in town: the warmaster, the steward, and the apothecary. They each carry different types of quests. Sometimes other NPCs will show up in town that will offer personal quests.

Items/Money----------------Items come in many different rarities or types: normal, common, rare, set, unique, and artifacts. Normal items are just that, normal. Common and rare magic items have some random magical enhancements with rare items usually having more. Set items belong to a group of items. If you can find and equip all of the items from a set, you will get some bonus enhancements. Many sets also have a partial bonus if you can equip part of the set. Unique items are items that are named, have enchantments that are always the same, and usually are very powerful. Artifact items are very similar to unique items but usually have at least one extra enhancement so they are even more powerful.

Money in the world of Aleria comes in the form of copper pieces (CP), silver pieces (SP), and gold pieces (GP).

100 Copper Pieces = 1 Silver Piece100 Silver Pieces = 1 Gold Piece

Staying Alive/Death------------------------There are many ways to regain health when your health gets too low. Typically the easiest way is to eat some food. Eating food will slowly regenerate your health and food is relatively cheap. The fastest way to regain health is to drink a health potion. Health potions instantly give you health but are relatively expensive. The cheapest way to regain your health is to use your lifestone. Using your lifestone regenerates your health fairly quickly and is free but you have to be in your house of course. And last but not least, if you are a priest, you can eventually get some spells that can heal wounds.

There are also many ways to help one of your party members to regain health when their health gets too low. You can feed them food by dropping food on their character or hitting the correct hotkey (F1 for first party member, F2 for second, ...). You can give them a health potion in the same way except the hotkeys start at F6. You can also head back to your house where your recruit will automatically heal at your lifestone. And finally, if you are a priest, you can heal your party members with any healing skills you might have.

Death is inevitable in Depths of Peril. When you die you can always resurrect using the power of your covenant's lifestone. This will use up some of your lifestone's health (until it is very low). If killed by monsters you will also incur a small XP debt penalty. This means you get less experience until you work off the XP debt. If you go and retrieve your soulstone that dropped when you died, the XP debt will be decreased.

Other Useful Info---------------------Each time you increase in level you get more attribute and skill points to distribute however you want. To use your attribute points, open up your character page (defaults to the C key), and press the + button next to the attribute you want to increase. You get 5 attribute points each level. To use your skills points, open your skill page (defaults to the S key), and press the + button next to the skill you want to increase. The higher your character's level the more skill points you get per level. Also note, that skills cost more and more with each skill level and that they also cost a certain amount of money to increase.

Item find, magic find, critical hit, crushing blow, and deep wounds bonuses are slightly misleading. They represent the bonus compared to normal. For example, a 100% bonus to critical hits means a 100% better chance than normal, not a 100% chance. So if your normal critical hit chance is 5% and you have a 100% bonus, the final value will be 10%.

Distracting a monster is very useful to the player, but mostly to a rogue since she can take advantage of their distraction. Many skills can distract a monster to varying degrees (minor, decent, and major) and some skills need a monster to be distracted to some degree. Be warned that any attack that uses the monsters distraction will remove the distraction effect.

Some skills require you or your enemy to be in a certain state or situation before that skill can be used. Usually a skill is usable if any of the listed states or situations occur.

You can cast spells directly on party members without selecting them, by placing the mouse cursor over their health/power bar UI and casting the spell with a hotkey.

If you have a hard time clicking on your lifestone, you can alternatively click on the lifestone/covenant healthbar on the right side of the screen.

Characters/Screenshots/Exports------------------------------Pretty much anything the game saves like characters, screenshots, and exportsgoes into a User directory. Where this is depends on your operating system.

All websites that have given us press coverage.Many forum posters who have already contributed input from the demo.

Troubleshooting-------------------First make sure you have the latest video and sound drivers installed for your system.

If your graphics are flickering, especially if your mouse cursor is having issues, try turning off the hardware cursor in the graphics options menu.

If you are having any strange sound issues try setting the Sound Device to DirectSound or MMSYSTEM in the sound options menu. You will have to completely get out of the game and restart the executable for this change to take effect though.

If you are running Vista and the first time your run the game it doesn't even get to asking about your name and security key, you might be having a dep issue. Follow these instructions to turn DEP off for Depths of Peril: 1) Go to Control Panel->System and Maintenance->System 2) Select "Advanced system settings" 3) On the "Advanced" tab under Performance, Click Settings. 4) Then select the "Data Execution Prevention" tab. 5) Add Depths of Peril to the list of apllications to not use DEP with 6) Click Apply and OK's as needed 7) Restart Vista.

There is also a startup problem when running ATI Tray tool's on-screen-display (it shows fps for any 3D application). If you have this tool turned on and the game fails to start, turn it off.

AC 97 sound cards with old drivers have had problems with Depths of Peril. If you have one of these sounds cards, please make sure you have the latest drivers.

If you have a dual-core AMD computer and everything runs too fast like it is being fast forwarded, then you might have a timing issue. If you are having this issue, go here and then download and install the AMD Dual-Core Optimizer utility.

If you have OS X 10.3.9 and the game doesn't start correctly you probably need to install OpenAL. You can download the OpenAL installer from Creative.

If you are still having problems your best bet is to read the Depths of Peril forums at http://www.soldak.com/forums/ to see if anyone else is having this problem and if there is a known work around. This is also the place to report any unsolved problems.

Troubleshooting Linux---------------------Depths of Peril needs OpenAL and OpenGL to run. Everything else that is required should already be on most, if not all, Linux distributions. While not required, it also runs better if you have S3/DXTC texture compression support. DoP is a 32bit app, so if your run a 64bit distribution you will need to make sure you also have 32bit libraries for everything to work correctly.

We will add instructions for more Linux distributions below and on our website as we can. If you get DC working on a distribution that is not on this list, we would love to know the details on our forums.

Updates/Patches--------------------Please go to http://www.soldak.com/ to find out about the latest updates and patches for Depths of Peril.

Mods-------We encourage people to modify the game if they want as long as they don't sell it in any way. See the EULA for specifics.

The pack files for the game are just normal zip files, most of the data is in there somewhere, and it is usually in text file format. So the game is pretty easy to modify. Also if you post questions on our forums about modding the game, we will in general help out if we can.

More legal stuff-------------------Depths of Peril and Soldak Entertainment are trademarks of Soldak Entertainment, Inc.